Bernard Caron

Bernard Caron

Research Associate, former Director at IFRA-Nigeria

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Bernard Caron, founder and first director of IFRA-Ibadan in 1990, is currently Directeur de Recherches Emérite at CNRS, the National French Agency for Research. While lecturing in English grammar and linguistics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure of Abidjan, and later at the University of Orléans, Bernard Caron wrote a Thèse d’Etat on Ader Hausa, a dialect of Hausa spoken in the Republic of Niger. He then became professor of Hausa at Inalco before joining CNRS in 2000 and specialising on the study of Chadic languages of the south of Bauchi State. He is now the principal investigator of NaijaSynCor, a project financed by ANR/CNRS that documents Naija (Common Nigerian Pidgin) as it is spoken throughout Nigeria. Bernard Caron wrote a dictionary and grammar of Zaar (a Chadic language of Bauchi State), and co-authored a French-Hausa dictionary with Professor Ahmed Amfani.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:

• Caron, Bernard. 2014a. Loanwords in South-Bauchi-West Chadic Languages. In Sergio Baldi & Géraud Magrin (eds.), Les échanges et la communication dans le bassin du lac Tchad, actes du colloque de Naples du réseau Mégatchad, 13-15 septembre 2012 (Studi Africanistici, Serie Ciado-Sudanese 6), 353–365. Naples: L’Orientale.
• Caron, Bernard. 2014b. Number in South-Bauchi West languages (Chadic, Nigeria). In Gerrit J. Dimmendaal & Anne Storch (eds.), Number-Constructions and Semantics - Case studies from Africa, Amazonia, India and Oceania (Studies in Language Companion Series 151), 283–308. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
• Caron, Bernard. 2015a. Minorités et conflits identitaires dans la fédération nigériane : une analyse linguistique et géopolitique. Hérodote 159. 27–44.
• Caron, Bernard. 2015b. Hausa Grammatical Sketch. In Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove & Dominique Caubet (eds.), Corpus-based Studies of Lesser-described Languages. The CorpAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00647533.
• Caron, Bernard. 2015c. Tone and intonation. In Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove & Dominique Caubet (eds.), Studies in Corpus Linguistics, vol. 68, 43–60. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/scl.68.02car. https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.68.02car (6 February, 2018).
• Caron, Bernard. 2015d. In Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove & Dominique Caubet (eds.), Corpus-based Studies of Lesser-described Languages. The CorpAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00647526/document.
• Caron, Bernard. 2016a. Information Structure & Peripheries in Zaar. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01359787.
• Caron, Bernard. 2016b. Cleft sentences and beyond: identification, specification and clause structures in Zaar. Presented at the GD1 workshop of the Labex EFL: “The typology and corpus annotation of information structure and grammatical relations” September 20, 2016, Villejuif (France). https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01370125.
• Caron, Bernard, Cécile Lux, Stefano Manfredi & Christophe Pereira. 2015. The intonation of topic and focus: Zaar (Nigeria), Tamasheq (Niger), Juba Arabic (South Sudan) and Tripoli Arabic (Libya). In Amina Mettouchi, Martine Vanhove & Dominique Caubet (eds.), Corpus-based Studies of Lesser-described Languages. The CorpAfroAs corpus of spoken AfroAsiatic languages (Studies in Corpus Linguistics 68), 63–115. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/scl.68.03car. https://benjamins.com/catalog/scl.68.03car.
• Caron, Bernard. 2017a. NaijaSynCor : A corpus-based macro-syntactic study of Naija (Nigerian Pidgin). http://naijasyncor.huma-num.fr/ (11 September, 2017).
• Caron, Bernard. 2017b. Comparison, similarity and simulation in Zaar, a Chadic language of Nigeria. In Yvonne Treis & Martine Vanhove (eds.), Typological Studies in Language, vol. 117, 167–188. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. doi:10.1075/tsl.117.07car. https://benjamins.com/catalog/tsl.117.07car (6 February, 2018).
• Bigi, Brigitte, Bernard Caron & Abiola S. Oyelere. 2017c. Developing Resources for Automated Speech Processing of the African Language Naija (Nigerian Pidgin). 8th Language and Technology Conference: Human Language Technologies as a Challenge for Computer Science and Linguistics, 441–445. Poznan, Poland. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01705707.
• Caron, Bernard. 2018a. Macrosyntactic corpus annotation. The case of Zaar. In Evangelia Adamou, Katharina Haude & Martine Vanhove (eds.), Information structure in lesser-described languages: Studies in prosody and syntax (Benjamins Studies in Language Companion Series 199), 157–191. Amsterdam: Benjamins Pub. Co.
• Caron, Bernard. 2018b. NaijaSynCor. Methodological and technical challenges of a corpus-based study of Naija (a post-creole spoken in Nigeria)”. Keynote address presented at the SYWAL 2018 (3rd Symposium on West African Languages) , 28th-29th September, Warsaw.
• Caron, Bernard. 2018c. Could Naija (aka Common Nigerian Pidgin) be a solution to the curse of indigeneity? (Nigerian Pidgin: E fit go be di future?). Presented at the Neuvième édition du CAAS (Consortium for Asian and African Studies, CAAS 2018), Inalco, Paris.
• Courtin, Marine, Sylvain Kahane, Kim Gerdes & Bernard Caron. 2018. Establishing a Language by Annotating a Corpus: the Case of Naija, a Post-creole Spoken in Nigeria. In Sandra Kübler & Heike Zinsmeister (eds.), Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation in Digital Humanities co-located with ESSLLI 2018, vol. 2155, 7–11. Sofia, Bulgaria: CEUR. Workshop Proceedings.
• Caron, Bernard. 2019a. A case for “slow linguistics.” In Margit Bowler, Travis Major & Harold Torrence (eds.), Festschrift in Honor of Russell Schuh (UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics), 13–26.
• Caron, Bernard. 2019b. Clefts in Naija. (Ed.) Enrique Palancar & Martine Vanhove. Linguistic Discovery (N° special sous presse).
• Caron, Bernard. 2020a. Chadic. In Rainer Vossen & Gerrit J. Dimmendaal (eds.), The Oxford handbook of African languages, 341–358. New product ed. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Caron, Bernard. 2020b. Methodological and technical challenges of a corpus-based study of Naija. In Nina Pawlak & Izabela Will (eds.), West African languages. Linguistic theory and communication, 57–75. Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press. https://doi.org/10.31338/uw.9788323546313. https://wuw.pl/data/include/cms//West_African_Pawlak_Nina_Will_Izabela_2020.pdf?v=1612354546850
• Bigi, Brigitte, S. Abiola Oyelere & Bernard Caron. 2020. Resources and Tools for Automated Speech Segmentation of the African Language Naija (Nigerian Pidgin). In Zygmunt Vetulani, Patrick Paroubek & Marek Kubis (eds.), Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics: 8th Language and Technology Conference, LTC 2017, Poznań, Poland, November 17–19, 2017, Revised Selected Papers (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence), 164–173. Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66527-2. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030665265
• Zeman, Daniel, Bernard Caron, Emmett Strickland, Marine Courtin, Kim Gerdes, Bruno Guillaume, Sylvain Kahane, Chika Kennedy Ajede, Emeka Onwuegbuzia & Samson Tella. 2020. UniversalDependencies/UD_Naija-NSC. Universal Dependencies. https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Naija-NSC
• Caron, Bernard. (sous presse). Clefts in Naija, a Nigerian pidgincreole. Faits de langues.